Reddit Bans Explicit Photos Without Consent

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Perhaps with more venture capital and investors, Reddit has been pressured to make more rules and avoid lawsuits. That would explain its new rule of prohibiting the posting of nude photos or explicit videos without prior consent.

The new privacy policy rules were unveiled Tuesday to the user-generated, online bulletin board's nearly 160 million regular users, the New York Times reported.

“I really want to believe that as we enter the next 10 years of Reddit life, essentially the most trafficked media site on the Internet, the opportunity here to set a standard for respecting the privacy of our users,” Alexis Ohanian, Reddit’s co-founder and executive chairman, told the Times.

Reddit was involved in a kerfuffle last year after hackers hacked into cellphones of celebrities and posted nude photos to several online sites including Reddit. After several take down requests, and likely many consultations with lawyers, Reddit removed the photos.

It could be considered strange that Reddit is becoming so concerned with its image now, especially since it had at least one sub-community devoted to trading photos of underage girls, but apparently attracting new venture capital means becoming more palatable to the masses. Reddit, as much as it can be, is becoming more family-friendly and not catering as much to creepy guys. In short, creepy guys don't grow a business as much as mainstream users do.